History

Last week VMware finally completed the first major update of VMware vRealize Suite, its well known cloud management solution, releasing in GA both vRealize Automation 7 and vRealize Business Standard 7.

vRealize Suite has always been accused to be VMware-centric only, and these new releases, including VMware vRealize Operations 6.1 and VMware vRealize Log Insight 3, don’t bring any particular change to this behaviour.

In fact Amazon AWS remains the only major Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) public cloud fully certified while Microsoft Azure and System Center 2012 R2 are still not supported at all.

Read more

On September 30, Mirantis announced the availability of version 7.0 of its OpenStack distribution in addition with the long awaited extension of the support from two to three years.

Mirantis OpenStack 7.0 is based on OpenStack Kilo, 11th release of the open source Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) engine, which introduced about 400 new features.

Among the key features of this new release we can find an enhanced scalability and resilience, improved interoperability with VMware vCenter and support for a wider choice in networking, including Juniper Contrail and VMware NSX.

Read more

During its annual VMworld conference held between August 30 and September 3 in San Fransicso VMware made several announcements. During the keynote on Monday several data center related announcements and on Tuesday announcements related to the topic End User Computing were made. This posts summarizes the announcements, providing links to more information where applicable.

The datacenter related announcements are:

VMware EVO SDDC

VMware EVO SDDC is the new name for what was initially EVO:RAIL or EVO:RACK announced in August last year by VMware. EVO SDDC is VMware’s converged infrastructure solution combining compute, network connectivity and storage in a box which competes with other converged solutions from Nutanix and SimpliVity among others. VMware EVO SDDC which can be purchased at VMware (for software only) and with OEM and system integration partners (Dell, QCT and VCE), contains vSphere vCenter Server, Virtual SAN, NSX, vRealize Operations Advanced, vRealize Log Insight. vRealize Automation Advanced and Horizon Enterprise as a VDI solution can be licensed optionally. The solution is managed by an automation engine called EVO SDDC Manager.

Read more

Microsoft today announced the release of the 3rd technical preview of the next version of its Server Operating System (Windows Server 2016 TP3) and corresponding management software (System Center 2016 TP3). Highlight in this TP3 release is the introduction of Windows Server Containers, Microsofts container virtualization platform which is part of the Docker open source project. Windows Server Containers can be deployed and managed using both PowerShell or the Docker Client, which Docker announced today. Containers can be deployed either in Windows Azure, running in a TP3 core installation or in a VM running on top of Hyper-V.

Microsoft today also released technical preview 3 of System Center 2016 Configuration Manager, Microsoft’s enterprise client management solution.

Read more

With the news of a $10 million Series B funding round Platform9 announced the GA of its SaaS solution Managed OpenStack for VMware vSphere.

Platform9 solutions leverages a mix of SaaS and on premises Virtual Appliance to provide into supported environments capabilities typical of Cloud Management Platforms (CMPs) such self-service provisioning, monitoring, configuration management,  etc.

With this new release Platform9 aims to enable VMware administrators to easily deploy and run an OpenStack-based private cloud with a new VMware specific Virtual Appliance which integrates the OpenStack controller services with vSphere resources.

The appliance leverages vSphere APIs and is 100% interoperable with VMware vSphere allowing the operations to be performed either via the OpenStack control plane or via vSphere directly.

Supposedly Platform9 is trying to ride the VMware-OpenStack integration increasing demand taking advantage of the cold reception of VIO.

Read more

OpenStack startup Platform9, provider of a cloud management platform that transforms the on-premises servers infrastructures into private clouds, announced to have closed a $10 million series B funding. The round was led by Menlo Ventures and Redpoint Ventures. Platform9’s total financing with this funding is $14.5 million.

Read more

Japanese multinational IT and services company Fujitsu, headquartered in Tokyo, has been approved by the Board of Directors of the OpenStack Foundation as Gold Member. Fujitsu has been a Corporate Sponsor of the OpenStack Foundation since 2013. The company has been a considerable participant to the last three OpenStack releases, furthermore it has also sponsored various OpenStack Community events in Japan.

Read more

On August 5, Red Hat has announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 7 (RHELOSP), based on OpenStack “Kilo” release.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 7 is backed by one of the biggest OpenStack ecosystems, with over 350 certified partners.

Read more

Apprenda, founded 2007 and headquartered in Troy, NY, a computer software company provider of Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) software announced that it has closed a $24 million series D funding. The round was led by Safeguard Scientifics, with New Enterprise Associates and Ignition Partners. Apprenda’s total financing with this funding is $56 million.

Read more